Real Life Internet Evil: Ezula

Our purpose with this series is to use real life examples of deception, fraud and other evil to show how you can better protect yourself. The examples cited in these articles are intended to demonstrate best practices and recommendations. If you were worried about Microsoft's smart tags, then perhaps you should read this article. Whereas you could argue that Microsoft didn't have the best of intentions with smart tags, at least they provided a way for webmasters to prevent them showing on their pages. On the other hand, Ezula (and it's product TopText) is the scum that scum wipes off scums feet. The company is evil. While they are not in the same league as Osama Bin Laden (who needs to be volunteered to a special project to determine the effects of nuclear missles on human flesh), they are evil. With them, though, the best "nuke" is to ignore their pitch and never install the product. If you've got it, remove it immediately. It's simple and and obvious. Here's what Ezula does. They sell users on some exaggerated benefit (much like that other scum product called Gator) and use this to get their product installed on the user's computer. In this case, Ezula "gives" their users something almost identical to smart tags. The product basically scans HTML pages as they are loaded onto a system, looking for keywords. When it finds a keyword, it replaces it with a special link to the page (or pages) of a page advertiser (along with some links to content of some kind - that's the "benefit" that gets people to install the silly product). Let's take an example. Pretend you want to sell tires, so you purchase the Ezula rights to the keyword "tires". Now, every time any web page of any Ezula user loads it is scanned for the word "tires". Ezula replaces those with links to your site - even if it is the site of one of your competitors! Or even a site about how people get tired ("he tires easily") or anything like that. Here's what they tell the users (the poor suckers who download this excrement): "eZula, Inc. is a leading provider of real-time contextual Internet solutions. eZula's flagship product TopText iLookup is the premier personal Internet reference and simplification tool, empowering millions of Internet users with an easy way to retrieve relevant information and simplify Internet Navigation." Sound's great, doesn't it? Man, if that's all you read you'd run to download this garbage. But wait, read more of the website. Go to the advertisers section and you will read, "eZula's platform leverages the content that the user is viewing in real time and turns key phrases, that best describe the advertiser, into a global advertising opportunity that drives qualified traffic to the advertiser from anywhere on the Web." They further describe, "ContextPro